Entries from February 2008 ↓

We all speak English and take it for granted that everyone who could possibly be interested in our ads does too. Let me tell you a little story. A couple months back, one of the affiliate programs I’m promoting decided they wanted to penetrate Canada more, so they implemented a bonus program if you could bring in a certain quantity. I had good stats with them, but only in the US. So I thought, what can I do to really penetrate the homeland? I tried city based campaigns in Google with dismal results. Then I thought, hey - a big chunk of the country actually speaks French! So with that I took a few minutes and converted two of my well performing ads into French with one of the many free translation sites on the net. I knew the result wasn’t quite right, but it was close, so I got someone I knew who speaks French to proof it for me, and a tweak or two later the ads were live. Oh, I also translated the keywords to French.

Anyways, what do you know, but that French campaign has done remarkably well! (Yes, it is wise to setup tracking on every campaign you run so you can tell if it stands or falls on its own merit and doesn’t get absorbed into everything else. More on this later perhaps.) I even got a bonus from the affiliate program for breaking some quantity thresholds!

So just a thought, if you are able to find an affiliate program that is doing well for you, expand it to every area you can think of. First go to the other search engines, then to other regions of the world if the shoe fits, then you can even experiment with some non-English ads. Make sure the program offers a landing page in your language of choice though!

This evening I “discovered” Alexa. I guess I knew about it before but this was the first time things really clicked when I looked at it. Basically what they do is rank all the webpages on the internet, in order of the traffic they receive. My site that has been live for 4 years was ranked 9,561,167. All of a sudden I have a goal to increase that ranking!

I’m in the process of setting up a webstore, so I decided to look up my competition on Alexa’s site. Turns out one store which I had previously thought was decent competition and might even be a good supplier is actually ranked at more than 3.5 million, while several of the others were in the 100-200,000 range, which is more respectable.

The other cool feature there is the Wayback Machine which actually contains an archive of the internet going back to 1996! So I looked at my site and what it looked like when I started it in 2004. Then I looked at my competitor’s sites, and found that my most serious competition started in 2007 and has gone up to a 208,356 ranking in that time! This tells me that they are probably my most serious competition and are on top of their game. The one I mentioned earlier with the lousy ranking has been around since 2001, with only minor updates in the first couple years of its existence. It appears to have sat idly since then. I’m glad I never pursued them as a supplier (which I had been considering at one point)! You can use these tools to tell you a lot about a website from a business and competition perspective!

I got started in affiliate marketing in May of 2004, and it was all due to an ebook I bought called GoogleCash. The book had just recently come out and it was a great resource and introduction to Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing using Google Adwords. Since that first edition the book has been updated a couple of times, and is now on its third edition; as Google has changed their own tactics over time the ebook has evolved as well. This book is probably one of the best introductory resources to PPC you will find on the internet. It is the one that got me started and I can truthfully say the techniques I learned from it have earned me thousands of dollars. 

GoogleCash is written for beginners and starts at square one, making it a perfect introduction, answering all the questions that someone who has never done this before would have. It walks you through the steps in finding an affiliate product to market, then how to create advertising for that product using Google Adwords, and then some good methods for creating well-performing ads and maintaining a successful ad campaign. Along the way the reader gets a complete introduction to the world of pay-per-click.

Simply put, GoogleCash3 is Pay-Per-Click Advertising 101 for any aspiring internet marketer.  

Hello everyone. Well I’m now officially self-employed as a self-declared internet marketer. I know many of you have wondered what the heck that really means, so the purpose of this site is to share some of the marketing tactics I’m experimenting with, and possibly to function as a bit of a resource for those of you who want to start up something of your own.

The other reason I’m doing this is more selfish: I wanted to have a single page that I could go to with all the links to useful things that I use often. I know there are many great pages out there loaded with these things, but hey, its cool if its your own right? I hope you find them useful too.

Cheers

Jonathan